


Shellshock

by Stylus_of_Gold



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: F/F, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-02-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 21:31:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stylus_of_Gold/pseuds/Stylus_of_Gold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elias Miranda of Biel-Tan was a crystal singer, a technician of sorts. Then one day she was swept up by the draft to a strange world, and nothing was ever the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1–Left together, Returned alone**

 

Elias Miranda of Biel-Tan was a technician of sorts. She sang to/repaired the crystal matrices which formed the power conduits of the craftworld, making sure the energy which was needed got where it was needed. It was a simple job, but often quite rewarding. She'd found friends in her co-workers Tam and Yurih, and a lover in Tam's sister Toryll. She'd gotten very good at it, one of the best.

Of course, none of that mattered now, because she had been drafted and was now staring death in the face.

She was on some Asuryan-forsaken maiden world, facing down a veritable horde of human settlers carrying crude firearms, she herself carrying naught but a shuriken pistol and a delicately curved sword. Her features were clearly feminine, but otherwise nothing could be discerned beneath her white and green, one-size-fits-all combat armour.

The field was in twilight, with tall grass covering the terrified eldar's approach to the terrified humans as each force sprayed wildly at the other, neither having had more than a few weeks of basic training before heading out.

The storm guardians knew their duty, but they also knew to wait for the signal to strike, lest they be caught unsupported. It was their task to, after providing distraction for the guardian defenders, advance under cover of fire to provide further distraction for the aspect warriors who would then make mincemeat out of the humans, thus spilling a minimum amount of eldar blood.

Of course, with the amount of emplaced guns there were, the autarch had to sacrifice a few lives, and that had been them; the storm guardians. Elias fired off a snap shot before melting back into the grass, where her white armour served to identify her as a target, voiding much of the effectiveness of her cover. However, she thought not of that, merely that she was scared and needed to get away from the gunfire.

There was a body next to her and as she crouched and hid from the gunfire she saw it was eldar.  _Tam,_ she thought in horror,  _this was Tam._

Utter horror washed over her then as she saw her friend Tam, his helmet blown off by a bomb and his arm snapped by gunshots, bones sticking out at drastic, unnatural angles from the crook of his elbow. Blood and other fluids pooled beneath his motionless body from this and several other wounds in his abdomen and chest, soaking his armour, his soulstone, his once-handsome face. His eyes were unfocused, staring at the blue sky above, and Elias felt herself barely able to comprehend the horror before her.

Her head swam, her stomach heaved, her body cramped. She felt her knees buckling, collapsed on the ground, fighting to keep her food down. She lay there, convulsing in her revulsion and terror, until she longed for a quick bullet to the head to end it all.

Elias knew not how long she lay there before she got up, but get up she did, picking her sword off the ground but being unable to find her pistol before a curt order came over the communication lines: "Now!"

Deadened, Elias charged the humans as they ducked their heads to avoid the scatter laser the other guardians had pointed at them. Elias saw her fellow storm guardians rushing up alongside her, saw her beloved Toryll be shot down next to her, then turned to the mon-keigh and saw red.

Howling in anguish and rage, Elias leapt over the sandbags and onto the first mon-keigh, swinging down and shearing through his collarbone. She then stepped forward and hacked wildly at the next, though he warded her off with bayonet till she stepped in, punched him in the face and then swung horizontally as he stumbled back.

The impact jarred her arm as her blade hit his spinal column, but it did not stop. The mon-keigh's head flew to her right, and she cried out in triumph and bloodlust as she literally jumped at the next mon-keigh, tackling him and knocking him back before sticking her blade through his gut.

Unaware of anything but the need to kill, Elias hacked savagely at the next mon-keigh, a woman who had shot her with a pistol, which felt like being punched, but never got the chance to shoot again before Elias' sword chopped her hand off and then swung diagonally up into her jaw.

Turning to find more, Elias had just a split second to register fear again before three mon-keigh gunned her down.

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There she lay, in a pool of her own blood, every part of her in agony from the multiple gunshots.

The bloodlust in her had ebbed as quickly as it had risen, and she lay there wondering what she had become. Had she become an animalistic beast? A monster which revelled in death and bloodshed? Did it matter, now that she was dying, as Tam had died? As her beloved Toryll had died?

She watched as the green figures –the striking scorpions– burst from the grass and slaughtered the humans like so many lambs. As one of them picked her up and brought her back, still conscious but numb to the world, into the field hospital.

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She awoke to find herself in the craftworld, the high, vaulted wraithbone walls white as the bed she lay in. She was good as new physically, but as the enormity of what had happened dawned on her, she let out a wail of anguish that was echoed for hours after she had been drugged back asleep. She knew not that her cry was echoed not by the walls, but by dozens of other survivors of the battle, their own experiences no less terrible than her own.

Within a week, they had let her out of the hospital. She knew then there was only one place for her to go: To the infinity circuit. To Toryll.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  
She stood in the twilight world within the craftworld, touching the soulstone of her lover as it slowly absorbed into one of the great wraithbone spires which supported the domed ceiling above. She had never had any significant psychic talent, but she knew at least how to contact such a recently-deceased soul.

Toryll stood before her. She had a shortish, stocky frame for an eldar and sharply slanted, auburn eyes. Her hair was short and ginger, her face round but not quite plump. Her ears were less pointed than normal and her breasts were small. Her skin was a bronzed pigment and somewhat rough for an eldar.

Her expression was one of scornful detachment, not at all like the last time Elias had seen her alive. Toryll, or Toryll's ghost, said in a harsher tone than she usually took "Who are you? What is it you want?"

Taken aback by this, Elias ventured "I am Elias. Do you not recognize me?" tears welling in her own blue eyes. "Ah," responded Toryll, "It is you. I apologize for my confusion," though her tone was still the harsh, distant one it had been before.

Elias broke down and started to weep. Toryll stood there, impassive, as Elias choked out "I don't know what to do. Without you," she sobbed, "without Tam, what will I do?" she pleaded, hoping against hope that Toryll would have some miracle answer. Toryll was always so much smarter than her, she always knew what to do. Toryll responded, her voice still distant, with only the faintest flicker of emotion betrayed by it "You will move on. You will find other friends, other lovers, and you will one day be happy. That is all."

Elias wept and wept until she could weep no more. She did not even notice when Toryll, or what was left of her, disappeared, leaving her alone once again.

* * *

AN: mon-keigh literally means mammal, and is somewhat of a derogatory eldar term for humans.


	2. Chapter 2–The scars that war leaves us

Elias woke in her bed. It was still quite dark, indicating that the arbitrarily decided on day-night cycles of the craftworld were still in the "night" phase. Toryll was at the foot of the bed and approached Elias slowly, and Elias sat up, smiling.

Toryll sat down on the bed, began crawling sultrily up to her and stopped, her face just above Elias'. But Elias could not see her face, because both she and Toryll were in their battle armour, and as she looked up she saw the bullet-holes in Toryll's chest and abdomen. Looking down on herself, she saw she too was full of wounds, blood seeping onto her bedsheets.

She looked up at Toryll. Her eyepieces betrayed not the slightest hint of emotion, but Elias could feel the rage within Toryll as her right hand shot out and closed around Elias' throat.

Panic mounted in Elias as Toryll squeezed harder and harder, pushing her back and pinning her against the wall as she snarled "Why? We had the same wounds, why did you live and I die?"

Elias felt as if she knew the answer, but couldn't say it. The hand choked her ever harder until her head swam and she blacked out.

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Elias awoke with a scream. It was light out, but she stayed in, shaking all over. The miracles of eldar medicine had allowed her to heal the bullet-wounds with no superficial scars at all, but had not saved her from the mental scars war left her.  _Why did I live and she die?_ she wondered hopelessly, _Why not have_ me _die instead?_

After several minutes of this sort of thought, Elias got up. Her apartment was a small thing like most homes on Biel-Tan: A bed, a dresser with a mirror and personal hygiene supplies, a closet and a door, all white but for the dresser, which was blue and the bedsheets, which were aqua. She walked over to the dresser and put on her clothes: A simple grey shift and a high-collared red dress.

Elias was a petite woman with rounded blue eyes, shoulder length chestnut hair, smooth pale skin and a sharply angled face.  
She was also a mess. After over a hundred day-night cycles, she had to conclude that Toryll's prediction had been completely inaccurate. Her job held no pleasure for her and her temperament had gotten more vicious as of late. She'd made no new friends, alienated some of her old ones and her life seemed to have become just one tragedy after another: her mother had died in a webway accident, her brother was rendered comatose by his seer training and she'd become more and more the recluse.

She felt she needed to find some way out of this downward spiral, anything would do. She had walked the path of the outcast once in her adolescence, she could do it again. But something in her dreams told her otherwise.

She'd dreamed often about the battle, and certain things were always at the forefront: the rush of pleasure she felt as she decapitated the human, the moment of fear she'd felt just before they'd gunned her down, Toryll's head jerking back as she fell dead beside her, Tam's mutilated corpse. And the moment when the green-armoured aspect warriors swooped in and saved her.  
That she remembered, curiously, with a sort of illogical fondness. She realized that in that moment she had felt destiny grip her, or at least she'd felt somehow safe in that moment; bullets riddling her body, being lifted out of a pool of her own blood, she'd somehow felt safe.

Elias was very much a mystic; she believed in fate and destiny, and she felt that unless she could find her true path, she would self-destruct completely and be left a withered husk, living a half-life.

And so to that end, she went against all advice and all logic and resigned from her post that very morning with naught but a recorded message dropped off at the humble, unassuming crystal-singer HQ, leaving the path of the crystal-singer behind her for a new one, a path that would take her back into the jaws of war to find her destiny, or so she thought.

And so that morning, she approached the cathedral of Khaine.

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The cathedral of Khaine was a truly awe-inspiring structure. Hexagonal it was, painted red all over, it's six spires twisting up into the top of the craftworld, each bearing the symbol of one of the phoenix lords: Asurmen the hand of Asuryan, Baharroth the cry of the wind, Fuegan the burning lance, Jain Zar the storm of silence, Maugan Ra the harvester of souls and Karandras the shadow hunter, though Karandras had the symbol of his predecessor Arha imposed behind his. This was unique to Biel-Tan: they despised Arha for his betrayal but unlike the other craftworlds still respected him for his creation of the striking scorpion aspect.

The temple's main structure was a huge dome which belittled every other freestanding structure in the craftworld; freestanding buildings themselves being reserved mostly for religious and governmental buildings.

Within the building there were three lesser yet still quite imposing spires which jutted out in a triangular formation for those aspects lacking a phoenix lord: The warp spiders, shining spears and crimson hunters. These too touched the ceiling of the craftworld, for though these aspects were younger, they were no lower in honour than the other aspects.

In the centre of the building was the central spire: the spire of Khaine. This spire was quite slender, as only eight were permitted to enter: the phoenix lords (though it had been decades since a phoenix lord had been seen in Biel-Tan), the medium; a seer dedicated to performing the ritual of awakening and the young king, who would go to the top of the spire in preparation for the ritual which would take place accompanied by the court of the young king beneath the cathedral in the craftworld's heart.

Elias knew all of this, it was part of the education of every eldar child on Biel-Tan, as well as discipline, history, literature, sciences and the basics of combat. She had set foot many times before in the cathedral of Khaine, but ever through the main entrance, never through the Gate of Warriors.

The Gate of Warriors was an ornate piece, painted in a red-orange pattern that gave the impression of a gate of fire. It was attended by two warlocks, one of whom would stop all who attempted to enter and were not already on the warrior path. There they would administer the first of the Tests of the Warrior, a psychic screening which some part of Elias hoped she failed.

Elias took a deep breath.  _This is destiny,_  she thought,  _I am destined to go through these doors._  Still, some part of her hoped she was wrong, wished she would fail the test, walk away from these doors and never turn back. She could again walk the path of the outcast, go see the galaxy, maybe find her destiny out there. But she had walked that path before and found nothing but sorrow in it for her, and had returned in short order.

Elias reached the gate. She presented herself to the first warlock, who wore a ceremonial white flowing robe with green rune armour and had an ornate green helm and elaborate sheath at his belt which held his not-so-ceremonial witchblade.

She approached him, shoulders straight, eyes forward, and as his head turned she said the ritual words "I am Elias Miranda and I wish to walk the path of Khaela Mansha Khaine. I have walked the path of the outcast, the administrator, the artisan and the crystal-singer and have found them wanting," though that was not entirely true. It was the ritual saying, but in reality the artisan path had found her wanting, and the crystal-singer path simply held too much pain for her now. The administrator path she really had found wanting in everything that wasn't boring, tedious monotony. She continued, "And now I wish to serve my craftworld as a warrior. Do you deny me?" it was a challenge, a ritual statement of intent and of defiance.

It was also the first part of the test: a nigh-impossible attempt to impose one's will upon a warlock, daring him to not let you in as if there was something you could do about it if he did not. Though none but a phoenix lord or a farseer could deny the word of these warlocks once their decision was made, this defiant challenge helped the warlock determine your strength of will; something extremely important for anyone walking the warrior path.

The warlock gazed long and hard at her, his expression concealed beneath the ornate helm her wore. He sized her up physically; this was the second part of the ritual. She knew her strengths and weaknesses: she was about as strong as someone her size could be, moderately fast, with a sound constitution which had allowed her to survive all those bullets and was quite flexible. However, she had little in the way of fine motor skills, the reach of her arm was sorely lacking, her mass was not exactly overpowering and she had somewhat poor eyesight.

The warlock nodded and said "Your body is that of a warrior. Now all that remains is to determine if your mind can be too," these were again ritual words, words which indicated she was passing on to the last, and most important, part of the test.

Elias steeled herself for the final part of the ritual: the psychic probing which would determine if her mind could be made into that of a warrior. The warlock reached out his long-fingered, bony, splotched hand and delicately placed it on her forehead. They looked into each others eyes, and Elias felt her whole life being wrenched out and observed, analyzed and judged.

All of her life flashed before her in that instant. The happy dream that was her childhood, so much of it forgotten after a mere century or so of existence, but now brought up and judged by a mind as far above her own as hers was above a human's: the mind of a seer. Those memories were cast aside as of little relevance and she lost them to the river of time as she had lost them before, the details of her early years slipping through her fingers suddenly as they had once done gradually, leaving her with a profound sense of loss, as though she had lost a part of herself forever.

The years of her adolescence were upon them then. Her foolish dalliance with Romall which had eventually led to her self-imposed exile from Biel-Tan. The rashness which had drove her to set out on the path of the outcast after his betrayal: an old wound which was now opened anew and allowed to return to it's full, heartbreaking proportions before being crassly cast aside like some irrelevant footnote.

The warlock explored with her the time when her first path became that of the outcast; first her travels through the webway with naught but a pistol, a knife, some rations, extra clothes, her education and several phrasebooks, as well as a woefully outdated map of the webway which she hoped wouldn't lead her astray, then the year when she was lost in the webway, her close brushes with starvation, devouring and commoragh slavers, and finally her falling in with a group of corsairs who dropped her off among the exodites, where she lived three years, picking up the skills of the wild but never truly becoming one of them.

After three years of such a primitive existence, Elias had returned to the webway and wandered again for a time, occasionally stopping at a known safe world and once being chased by humans and having to destroy the portal she came through to avoid capture.

She'd found herself to be quite resourceful during that time, a trait which the warlock picked up on and homed in on, but also rather reckless, often having to think her way out of situations which could easily have been avoided if she had taken a little more care.

In time, she'd found herself in the company of a few other outcasts and travelled with them to a place called by the natives Bork'an, apparently part of a fledgeling empire which had acquired a great deal of technological knowledge in a short time. She had fallen in with another one of the outcasts named Loren of Alaitoc, but that had lasted only a couple short months.

She had always been linguistically gifted, and after a short time found herself acting as translator for her group, something which the warlock barely noticed, but he took a keen interest in the uneasy feeling she felt around the natives, who despite being agreeable folk for the most part gave her the chills, particularly around their ruling cast.

Feeling unfulfilled by this nomadic existence, she had at last returned to her craftworld and there taken the first position available to a linguistically gifted young woman: That of a low level administrator, a record-keeper who could barely be called a bureaucrat. The warlock seemed oddly pleased to note that her time there had been miserable; that she had felt more unfulfilled than ever and was happy to be rid of such a dull path, which somewhat incensed Elias.

She had blossomed into a full-grown woman then before moving onto the path of the artisan, but she had found that frustrated her too. The warlock dismissed her failures in that path as irrelevant compared to the fact that she kept at it for five years, something he noted with approval which further incensed Elias.  _That was one of the greatest mistakes of my life!_  she thought,  _Five years of failure, five years of my life wasted and all he gives is mild approval at my "perseverance"?_

Looking upon her past as it lay sprawled out before her she came to the conclusion that if this smug warlock would not allow her into the cathedral, then she would return to the path of the outcast; besides the last few years that had been the one time she had been happy, if somewhat unfulfilled.

He then came upon the falling out she'd had with her superior and her subsequent leaving of the artisan path. At the time she'd been overwhelmed by the weight of what she saw as defeat. Now she looked back on it as one of the best decisions of her life, but the Warlock saw it only as insubordination.

Next, they came upon the twenty-five years as crystal-singer. She'd ascended to the highest position one could achieve without being consumed by the crystal-singer path, found friends and for a while was truly happy. She'd found her element and excelled, and three years in had found Toryll. The warlock was as impassive to her happiness as he'd been to her sorrow, and all too soon had cast aside the best part of her life as irrelevant.

Finally, he came upon the battle and began picking apart her every decision. He looked with distaste at how she'd been so afraid but seemed understanding somehow, examined her use of available cover with mixed approval and reproach, lauded her instinct which had kept her wound-free till the final stages, shook his metaphysical head at her nausea at the sight of Tam then recalled who it was and shrugged. Finally, he seemed quite pleased by the bloodlust which had so terrified Elias and the instinctive skill at hand-to-hand combat she seemed to possess.

In an instant, it was over. He'd seen her life, seen her nature, seen straight into her soul. She had never felt so exposed, so vulnerable, and took a step back to try to break the connection with this warlock.

Stepping back, Elias realized she was shaking all over from rage, revulsion and anticipation.  _Who is he to judge me? she thought angrily, To look at my life and decide which parts are "relevant"?_  
The answer was obvious to her: he was the guardian of the gate, that was his job, but she still resented being judged so callously. She also knew she'd failed. He'd declared nigh half her life to be irrelevant, and the rest had been, in his books, naught but fear, insubordination, combat paralysis and poor judgement. There was no way he'd let her into the cathedral.

"Enter, young one. May you find your destiny in the heart of war," the warlock proclaimed, derailing Elias' train of thought. As she entered the cathedral, still stunned that the warlock let her in, some part of her wondered why she felt no rush of elation nor any great joy upon entering.


End file.
